An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box
by
George E. P. Box
From early childhood to a celebrated career in academia and industry, acclaimed statistician George E.P. Box offers personal insights and a first-hand account of his professional accomplishments in this insightful memoir. It features thoughts from more than a dozen researchers and practitioners on how Box shaped their careers; previously unpublished photos from Box’s personal collection; and Forewords written by two of Box’s closest colleagues and confidants. An Accidental Statistician is a charming, intimate account of a great intellect’s life that will appeal to math and engineering professionals.

Why I dislike the name Six Sigma
by
Rafael Aguayo
"Lack of management appreciation of the need for participation. Deming emphasized joy in work, teamwork and listening to your people. This seems to be totally lacking in Six Sigma. In fact major SS practitioners emphasize practices that will destroy teamwork, company cohesiveness and pride.
...
Failure to appreciate the company as a system. Making improvements to one variable, such as material costs, can lead to higher labor costs. Lowering costs in one department can lead to higher costs overall for the company. These mistakes can be avoided if one understands the systemic nature of a company."

William Considine embraces Lean Six Sigma to improve Akron Childrenâ€™s Hospital
"before it brought out the hammers, it asked members of the department and of the hospital's Lean Six Sigma team to review the problem. Turns out, a simple redesign of the processes and space solved the problem. No space added, no employees added, and $3.5 million saved.
...
f your child needed an MRI two years ago, the waiting list at Akron Childrenâ€™s was about 25 to 28 days. Through discussion with department employees and dissection of the workload, the hospital was able to add 35 MRI tests a week, dropping the wait time to three days or less."

Operational Excellence: From Fragmented Vocation to Principle-Driven Profession
by
Steven Spear
"Be it lean, six sigma, lean six sigma, business process excellence, reengineering, or TPS, the common objective is creating substantial and sustainable competitive advantage by managing the internal operations of organizationsâ€”across the spectrum of development, design, and deliveryâ€”to create exceptional differentials in performance across the dimensions of quality, cost, reliability, responsiveness, security, and agility."

Systems Have Their Place: Second Place
by
Tom Peters
"too much reliance on the apparently 'hard' procedures of, say, six-sigma programs and not enough attention to those underlying, apparently 'soft' attributes such as the respect for and engagement of the workforce.
To support my point, Iâ€™ll offer up nine case studies of quality programs, often in incredibly resistant environments, that did produce remarkable results. It turns out that they have two principal elements in common:
* Passionate local leadership
* A bedrock corporate culture that supports (or comes to support) an ethos of superior
quality work and, indeed, excellence as standard fare."

Adding Customer Value in Development at Xerox
"Business901 Podcast featured Patrick Waara talking about Xeroxâ€™s use of Agile techniques... Our conversation originally was designed to discuss swarming and Lean problem solving. However we ventured off into the subject of how Lean, Six Sigma and Agile all work under the same umbrella"

Six Sigma and the Mobile Workforce
by
Lynda Finn, Sue Reynard
"This type of data collection also helps process owners or managers spot systemic problems that appear across processes. For example, a process owner reviewing all field agent reports may detect problems appearing in more than one location. Now, a fix ma

Working with Rare Events
by
Donald J. Wheeler
"Whenever the average count per time period drops below 1.00 you are working with rare events.
...
When this happens you should shift from counting the events per time period and instead measure the area of opportunity between the rare events. Here you cease to get a value every time period, and instead get a value every time you have an event."

One Perspective on the Future of Six-Sigma
by
Roger Hoerl
Six-Sigma has maintained momentum for over ten years now, longer than many pundits expected. However, the key question remains: how long will Six-Sigma remain front-page news? The answer is that it will remain front-page news as long as it delivers front-

Variation, So Meaningful Yet So Misunderstood
by
Lynda Finn
"assuming an issue is the result of a special cause will send you on a hunt for the special cause. Walter Shewhart and Deming proved that special cause thinking will lead you astray most of the time. So, if in your company there is often a search for whom or what is to blame before questioning whether the problem is built into the current processes and systems, then you too are likely wasting time and misidentifying causes."

Response surface methods and sequential exploration
by
Ron Kenett, David M. Steinberg
"A typical response surface study begins with a screening experiment to identify the most important factors. Small, orthogonal experimental plans and simple regression models are usually used for screening (see our second and third blog posts in this series). Subsequent experiments will depend on the results of the screening experiment. For example, factors that had small effects might be dropped from further consideration. Other factors might be added. The team might decide to shift the levels of some of the factors to get better results for the critical quality attributes (CQA’s). If the results suggest that a first-order model is no longer a good fit to the data, the team expands the design to permit fitting a second-degree regression model."

Management Web Sites and Resources

Shmula
by
Peter Abilla
"This blog is my take on technology, business, operations, The Toyota Production System / Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Queueing Theory, operations research, building software, the customer experience (especially ethnography and design thinking and word-of-mouth marketing)"

Got Boondoggle
by
Mike Wroblewski
"My lean experiences include learning directly from the original lean leaders including Dr. Shigeo Shingo. As a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, I believe quality is a cornerstone of all improvement actions. By sharing these experiences and insights, my hope is that you may benefit on your lean journey."

Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter
by
John Hunter, William G. HunterGeorge Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters.
Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement
by
George E. P. Box, William G. Hunter
Founded in 1985 by George E.P. Box and the William Hunter at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
The technical report series is one of the best online management resources with reports authors including: George Box, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, Kaoru Ishikawa, William Hunter, Gipsie Ranney and Brian Joiner.
Sadly the center has abandoned the ideas of George Box and Bill Hunter. It once was a very important center for thought about management improvement. The legacy left by Box and Hunter has been lost. I find this very sad and a huge insult to the memories of those great men. Bill Hunter was my father and built the Center after he was diagnosed with fatal cancer because it was a useful way to provide benefit to the world. Seeing that cause abandoned I find insulting and extremely unfortunate for all those that no longer have the possibility of benefiting from the vision of Box and Hunter through the center.
Thankfully many people that learned from them have continued to build upon their work. And their books, writing and other material continue to inspire those interested in management improvement.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections
by
John Hunter
The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life.
The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.